VizThink Blog

Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

It’s time for another book review.  Releasing later this week is Luke Wroblewski’s latest book, Web Form Design.  Not surprisingly, the book is about how to design good forms for websites.  Luke is an author, the Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc, and was a facilitatorat our recent VizThink event in San Francisco.

I wish I could say that a book like this wasn’t necessary because every website used good design principles when creating their sites, but, having filled out too many web forms, the concepts are something that anyone gathering information from website visitors should read and implement.  While building on earlier efforts by the likes of Jakob Nielsen, Alan Cooper, and Don Norman, Luke takes a different approach in some ways more broad talking about overall design principles and in some ways more narrow focusing only on forms.  While books of this sort could easily devolve into programming lessons, Luke keeps his focus on his mission of good design. 

At first, you may wonder why a web form design book fits in the visual thinker’s library.  The User Experience/Interface Design/Usability community has much in common with visual thinking, and are, in fact, a vital part of the community.  Just like other groups, they work with complex information and try to present it in such a way that reduces the time needed to process the information and increases comprehension.

In the first two chapters of the book, Luke focuses on why form design matters and the overall organization of forms.  He also presents the case for form design as a conversation between the company and the customer including the benefits and disadvantages of using a conversational tone.  In the next 6 chapters, he dives into the details of particular form elements with advice on how and when to use them.  Throughout these chapters, Luke focuses on the impact of element selection on flow.  Each of the ideas are supported with usability testing including some very interesting eye tracking technologies used by Etreand Matteo Penzo.  He does a particularly nice job of talking about the use of passwords and password fields in a registration form, but then I think he brushes over the creation of a “password so secure they can’t remember it”.  Maybe it’s one of my pet peeves, but if the website has thought enough to design a form with the instructions to create a “secure” password that has “one uppercase letter, two symbols, and three numerals”, they should also be kind enough to put those same instructions on the login screen.

The book really gets interesting in the final 6 chapters where he covers the more complex issues of interactivity, help, validation, and even a nice section on what’s next with forms.  Advice on smart defaults (using the responses from the majority of your audience as a default), personal defaults (using the previous responses from a person to inform defaults), inline validation (checking responses as they are typed), and maybe most interestingly his concept of gradual engagement.  Why have people fill out forms at all?  In fact, forms deter the involvement of many people.  One of his examples is a travel documentation service called TripIt.  Rather than asking the visitor to provide lots of information about themselves up front, the service gets the person going right away and then gathers pieces of the information over time as they are needed.  Form design by eliminating forms, now that’s innovation!

Overall, the book is a well-written, quick read and essential for those who are just getting started with form design.  For those in the user experience community, the book has a few interesting new takes, but may be a bit basic.  However, if that were really true, we wouldn’t have so many bad form designs.

Two versions of the book, print & digital ($36) and digital only ($19), go on sale this Thursday.  Members of the visual thinking community are eligible for a 10% discount using the code FOVIZTHINK at the Rosenfeld Media website:

http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/

Check back here later this week for a podcast with Luke!